Free Republic

The Television Critics Awards last night apparently had some drama after all. According to a Tweet from Ellen Thompson, the wife of TV Line’s Dave Nemetz, actress Elisabeth Moss– a Scientologist since birth — walked out of the room when Leah Remini won the award for reality TV. Remini’s A&E TV series “Aftermath” tells the story of how brutally Scientology has treated its followers. Moss has never been a vocal Scientologist, unlike Tom Cruise, John Travolta and a number of other celebrities. She’s kept it mostly to herself. But Remini’s series obviously hit a sore spot for her. Here are...

Is SETI—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—a religion? This is one of the topics that Jill Tarter, Director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute, and I discussed on "Are We Alone?", the SETI Institute's weekly radio program on Wednesday May 17. The discussion by Jill and I was in response to a claim made by George Basalla (professor emeritus of history at the University of Delaware) in his book Civilized Life in the Universe (Oxford University Press: 2006) that SETI is more of a faith-based enterprise than a genuine science. He points to SETI's failure to make...